I have written thousands of words and poured out a novel that may rival the Notebook chock full of eternal love, wanting, longing, hoping, aching, knowing and felt the words as they poured out of me onto that computer screen tethering each letter and word straight from the heart. But there was one word that I only mentioned on an oh so rare occasion.
That word…Surrender.
I was curious to look in that book. 50,000 words and a control F later this was the only time surrender showed itself.
“To truly understand love is to surrender any protection against it. In making that choice to surrender there are feelings, raw emotions that are part of our nature that we suppress because we don’t want to feel hurt or pain.”… “I have come to a place of true surrender.”
Now years later I can look back on that passage and see so many ways surrender has shown up in my life and how it played its part at that time in my life. I did come to a place of surrender when I wrote that years ago. It was true surrender in that moment for what I knew it to be from my choices and experience then. As I have transformed and grown I know now that the meaning of surrender changes in every moment as I grow in my spiritual practice. Surrender is not a practice that stops. It just changes with the moments created.
I have used that word a lot this year…surrender. Surrender has walked by my side and led me to many teachers guiding me to embrace what it means to me right now. Eckhart Tolle is a great teacher of being in the now which naturally flows into surrender and yielding to, instead of resisting life.
As I have come to learn in my walk within, if we are seeking it, then we haven’t quite understood the lesson. Whether it is love, happiness, peace, joy, surrender, whatever you are in search of, it is not out there somewhere to find. It is within and it is present in every single moment if we are aware enough to see and feel the experience. Sometimes we get caught in the mind chatter in thinking we have to find it within first too. That’s Ego too. You don’t have to go in search of it, you don’t have to meditate for hours to achieve it, you don’t have to be alone for days on end for it to manifest within you, and you don’t have to go to a retreat that will activate something to open you up. The to do list could go on for things you think you need to do to find whatever “it” is. All of the things we seek to want or desire in our life already live inside us…in every moment. Surrender has always been within me. I just resisted and didn’t yield in some areas of my life. What I learned from reflecting on that passage was yes, I truly yielded to love years ago. But it wasn’t even about yielding to love. It was about being present enough in the moment to be aware that love was always there and I was just blocking, protecting, guarding myself from it. Presence is what made that surrender happen. Now it is about being present with surrender in yielding to life. Saying yes to all of life and not restricting the flow. Not resisting or trying to force an outcome to happen. Not wishing or hoping for what I want to be and not convincing me I need to do anything else first before I can share the beauty that resides within me always in every moment. Ego has the subtle way of suggesting we should do something first before we can do anything else or even better share ourself with someone else and be open to flow because Ego is fearful to lose control. I am familiar with Ego’s ways and I recognize the delay tactic used in that familiarity of repeating self sabotage rhetoric to ourselves that allows Ego to maintain that control in our mind to create those sabotaging thoughts and removes us from being in the now and being present.
So, surrender to me in this moment now means what I have to do is Be Present and yield to the flow of life. Let go of the banks of the river and flow to where the moment takes me. Stop fighting the current, be bold, be fearless and surrender to everything in life.
